


JN7N and The Losers (or, The Story of A Cyborg's Humanity)

by AngeNoir



Category: The Losers (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Body Modification, Cyborgs, Gen, Team Bonding, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-21
Updated: 2013-01-21
Packaged: 2017-11-26 08:19:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/648506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AngeNoir/pseuds/AngeNoir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jensen might be made up of mechanical parts, but his heart is human, even if the entire army thinks otherwise.</p>
<p>Well. The entire army except for the Losers.</p>
<p>Crazy bastards that they are.</p>
            </blockquote>





	JN7N and The Losers (or, The Story of A Cyborg's Humanity)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [legendary_patsy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/legendary_patsy/gifts).



> I am so, so sorry. I don't think this is what you wanted at all, but I didn't know where to go with it. I tried to put in Jensen being protective, but I don't even know if I managed that correctly.

“Bet you’re wishing you stayed with your old unit, huh, Jen?”

“You kidding?” Jensen yelled back to Pooch, feeling his joints whirr and his vision sparking from one eye. “I wouldn’t trade this for the world!”

“God-fucking-dammit, Roque, Coug’s down, you gotta carry him. Jensen, can you create a diversion?”

Jensen knew he was crazy, but he really didn’t know how crazy until he realized the amount of shit his team was in, and what he was considering doing to keep them safe. And yes, he thought of them as his team even though this was a loan period. Even if in the end he ceased his existence because of his low charge – even if he didn’t cease existence, but went back to his real team, where he was treated as a glorified computer, an object – he’d have this mission, he’d have the memories, and goddamn but he wouldn’t give them up for the world.

“Sure thing, bossman!” Jensen replied merrily, diverting power to his one good arm, the other clutched tight to his body, and then he leapt over the desk he had hidden behind, charging the gun runners in a lull of their fire, shooting concentrated plasma beams with what little power he had left.

-+-+-+-

Jensen’s CO, Wade Wilson, walked in with just one word: “Cyborg.”

Jensen half-turned in his seat to look at his CO. “Yeah, boss?”

“You’re on loan. Owe a guy a favor. Don’t screw up. Room 38.”

That was pretty much it. No more explanations, no orders. Jensen ended up getting up from his desk, shutting down his operations on the computers and wandering down to the room his CO had told him.

From the time it had taken Jensen to walk from his team’s offices to his new team’s offices, he had looked up their files to learn that the Losers were aptly called that – they didn’t get the cutting edge mods, they didn’t get the easy jobs, and they certainly didn’t get the best equipment. What they did get was a single mod (the XO, apparently), a sharp mechie who knew his way around the mods, a sniper who didn’t have any mods at all, and a commanding officer who didn’t have any mods either.

Jensen, being a full cyborg (of the JN7N line), was surprised that this tiny team with barely any pull or weight had managed to snag him from Wilson. There had only been eleven JN7N units made, after all, and of those eleven only four were functional anymore (Jensen was more than aware of his line’s failings – and also of his line’s superior ability to all other cyborg units out there). He was a valued asset – that, apparently, could be loaned out because of a poker game.

Then again, his CO didn’t really have a high opinion of Jensen in the first place. And refused to actually call him Jensen, calling him ‘cyborg’ or ‘you’ or, when not directly referring to Jensen, ‘it’ – which, okay, that was fine, really it was, because Jensen had, after all, was so modified that he no longer classified as human under the governmental definition. Literally over seventy percent of his body was mechanical.

When he walked into room 38, he was greeted with the sight of a mod soldier (had to be the XO, William Roque, Captain, tactician, mod was comprised mainly of superhuman strength but also some small pyrotechnic abilities) over the top of someone else’s desk (bald guy, laughing hysterically, most likely the mechie, Linwood Porteous, Sergeant, pilot, probably could have qualified as an actual mod-technician but settled on just being a good mechie), holding the guy around the throat and giving him a knuckle-rub to the top of that bald head. The desk they were around was set in one corner, to the left of Jensen as he stood in the doorway. That desk sat opposite another desk, and catty-corner to a desk that rested in the middle of the room. Between the opposing desk and the catty-corner desk was a doorway – almost directly across from where Jensen was standing at the moment, with the door firmly closed. The room itself was pristine and clean, though the corkboard set up next to the doorway was full of pictures of a fat cat and a beautiful woman.

The two froze and Jensen didn’t quite know what to do. So he smiled and waved, because yeah, okay, he was one the last four functional JN7Ns, but the problem with his line was difficulty handling social interaction on top of the increased technical load and combat training. So he really didn’t know how to react when your new XO was trying to strangle his subordinate over his subordinate’s desk when you first met him.

“Who the fuck’re you?” Roque demanded.

“Jensen,” Jensen replied simply enough. “I, uh. I’m on loan?”

Roque narrowed his eyes, and Jensen couldn’t help his eyes from traveling over that modified arm because really, that was a masterpiece, and he would love to get up close and personal with the mechanics of that arm if the mechie didn’t mind.

“Clay didn’t mention a loaner,” Porteous murmured.

Roque glared a moment more and then got up off of the smaller man, walking to the CO office door and rapping on it sharply.

“Go the fuck away, Pooch, and tell Roque to get his damn paperwork done!”

“Clay!”

There was silence for a moment, and Jensen wondered if the reason they were such a low-end team was because they had absolutely no order or respect for propriety. Certainly, Jensen’s team had spent quite a bit of time pounding into Jensen’s head the appropriate way to act towards his superiors – which was everyone classified as human.

Finally, the door opened, and an older man, hair greying at his temples, nose a bit crooked, and dressed in a suit (odd, but then again, this entire team seemed odd) stood in the doorway. “What, Roque?”

Then he caught sight of Jensen and he frowned thoughtfully. “You the cyborg Wilson promised me?”

“Sir, yessir,” Jensen said easily, smiling. “I was just wondering if I was in the right place.”

“You’re in the right place alright. That desk over there is yours.” Jensen figured he was talking about the single desk that was unoccupied. “We’re shipping out tomorrow, and we basically need a hacker who can ghost us into the compound and rip off the hard drives while we find the head of the operations and take him out. That’s about it. You follow the order of everyone in this room.”

“Of course,” Jensen said, rolling his eyes.

Clay narrowed his eyes. “That’s Sergeant Porteous, this is Captain Roque, and that’s Sergeant Alvarez.”

That made Jensen jump – he hadn’t seen a third person. Whipping his head around to his right, he realized there was a desk shoved up in one corner, almost hidden by the file cabinets that were behind Jensen’s new desk, and a man in a cowboy hat had his boots up on the table, watching Jensen under the brim of that hat.

“I am Lieutenant Colonel Clay. You will address us all with our titles, and be respectful while you do it.”

“Sure thing, boss. Ah – Lieutenant Colonel Clay. Sir.”

Clay gave him a stink-eye, but didn’t say anything else. “Wheels up tomorrow, oh nine hundred.”

“Yessir, Lieutenant Colonel Clay, sir.”

Porteous snickered. Clay shot him a glare and moved back into his room, closing the door behind him.

For a long moment, Roque glowered at Jensen, and Jensen just stood there, not quite sure of his welcome but not willing to back down either. Finally, Roque growled something uncomplimentary under his breath and stormed over to his desk.

Taking that as the okay that Jensen could come fully into the room, he did so, walking over to the desk that Clay had indicated. As he walked, he could feel everyone watching him curiously.

Well. He supposed he would be an oddity, especially considering that he was a lot higher-end than this team would have ever seen before.

“You’re a cyborg, then?”

“Yep.” Jensen sat down and logged into the servers, running through the hard drives in the back his mind as he called up the mission the Losers were slotted to complete and getting the details of their departure.

“What line?” Porteous asked, leaning forward.

Jensen glanced over, though he could really only see Porteous with one eye – the other had all the data he was calling up running over it in ones and zeroes. “The JN7N line.”

Roque whistled, folding his arms behind his house. “You’re one of those new ones that’s supposed to be able to pass as human, right? ‘Cept it’s kinda a dead giveaway if one of your eyes glow.”

“Well,” Jensen started, and paused. “Well, yeah, superficially, we’re supposed to be able to pass for human. But really, the JN7N line is supposed to be able to handle combat training, social interaction, and technical functions such as hacking and security measures.”

“Your kind were an expensive fuck-up, though, right?” Roque pushed.

Jensen bit his tongue and after counting to ten in Russian, Arabic, and Greek, he responded, “Yeah, we kinda were. Only four functioning units, including yours truly. Turns out it’s hard to have a human brain handle everything that was expected of it. Most units couldn’t handle it, or the workload, and burned out very quickly. Then again, there’s no other cyborg line out there that can do what we do. I mean, you have cyborg lines that are for social interaction, or for combat situations, or hackers, but to combine those three functions in one is a lot of strain on the programming and let’s face it, not a lot of humans could do all those three functions either.” Jensen realized he’d let his mouth run away with him and closed his mouth with a snap, waiting for a reprimand for speaking so much.

But it didn’t seem to faze any of them at all, least of all Porteous. “So how are you functional?” Porteous asked. “What makes you different than those seven that failed?”

Jensen preened a little. “Awesomeness? Ability to multitask? I’m just that amazing?”

“Humility’s out,” Roque grunted, but he looked grudgingly amused.

“Do you mind if I poke around?” Porteous hedged, gesturing vaguely at Jensen, and Jensen assumed he meant ‘access your mainframe through your ribs.’ “I’m a mechie; I’m used to fixing up Roque when something messes with his mod in the field.”

Jensen winced. “I’d mind. I mean, dude, no offense, you could be a mod-tech if you wanted, but my circuitry’s tricky under the best of circumstances. Generally speaking, no one really messes with it unless I’m glitching.”

“And do you glitch often?” Porteous pressed.

At that, Jensen couldn’t help preening. “Never.”

Behind him, there came a snort, which made Jensen jump – he forgot cowboy boots (Alvarez) was there – and then the sound of movement. “Food?” Alvarez asked, moving to the door.

“Chicken burritos, if you’re heading out to that taco truck,” Porteous said instantly.

“Whatever,” Roque grunted.

After a long moment, Alvarez kicked gently at Jensen’s desk. “Food?”

“Hey, do you have a name?” Porteous added.

To be completely honest, Jensen had not considered that Alvarez had been asking him in the least. Cyborgs, being human, did actually require human food, but so many people forgot it that Jensen had gotten used to never being asked. Besides that, because Jensen’s body was so heavy on the mechanics that he could go longer than a normal human without eating solid food, just recharging his mechanical bits from an electrical socket, like a palmie or a mobile. “Uh – um. Yes? I guess? Whatever you want.”

Alvarez nodded and stepped out of the room.

“Do you have a name? It’ll get confusing if we have to call you ‘you’ all the time,” Porteous pushed. “For example, you can call me Pooch. Nickname. Much better than either Linwood or Porteous.”

Jensen half-turned his head to Roque, who had grudgingly picked up a stylus but hadn’t actually started any paperwork yet, as evidenced by the fact that he had yet to set the stylus to the desk-screen. “Do you have a nickname?” Jensen asked curiously.

“You call me anything other than Roque and we’re gonna have a problem,” Roque rumbled.

“Right. Roque. Pooch.” Jensen nodded to himself, running a finger over one of the desk-screens, tapping his way through the previous mission files in order to get a feel for this team’s success rate.

A small stylus flew across the room and hit Jensen in the head. Startled, he looked up to see Pooch sitting there with something close to an understanding look. “Name?” Pooch asked quietly.

And – well, yeah, Jensen called himself Jensen, but then again, that was the way most people pronounced the acronym JN7N anyway. So he just shrugged one shoulder and said, “They call my units Jensens, you know that.”

“Yeah,” Pooch sighed.

The office lapsed into silence, and Jensen wondered whether he’d failed some kind of test.

-+-+-+-

The distraction proved to work – the gun runners certainly hadn’t been expecting a suicide run by one of them, and Jensen had had precious seconds before he’d gotten shot at again, seconds that let him take out three of the five left. Three out of five meant there were still two, though, alive and with ammo, and Jensen felt a plasma bolt burn its way across his bicep and then had a moment of pure panic when he realized that the second guy had been charging an EMP blaster – something that wouldn’t just take out Jensen but Roque as well. With a furious yell, he launched himself over the stack of boxes just as the blaster let out a high-pitched whine and a concussive force hit him dead center of his chest.

Everything went black.

-+-+-+-

On the plane, Alvarez sat cleaning his guns slowly and methodically while Roque folded his arms and appeared to drop right off.

Jensen was nervous as anything. Frankly, Wilson had never actually taken Jensen into the thick of the action, though Jensen was certainly trained to do such missions. He didn’t want to let down this team, especially considering that Clay had actually come up to Jensen before they had taken off and asked if he needed anything special to function at optimal condition. Yeah, okay, that was a standard question all COs were supposed to ask a cyborg that was coming along with them, but no one _really_ asked. After all, cyborgs were supposed to be inhuman, able to keep on going no matter what happened. They weren’t supposed to need anything beyond a place to plug in to keep themselves charged and human sustenance every three days.

“You okay, Jensen?”

Jensen jerked his head up. Clay was sitting across from him now, looking at him worriedly.

“What? No, yeah, I’m okay, I mean, yessir Colonel Clay sir, everything’s fine,” he said, trying to figure out why Clay was over here. Had one of them complained about him? Maybe he was supposed to be doing something hacker-ish? He’d already provided Clay with all the intel he could extrapolate from the measly information the army had grudgingly parsed out to them.

“I know Roque can be a little intense, and Pooch is a curious sonuvabitch that likes to take things apart for fun, but if they ever pressure you too much or bother you, just let me know,” Clay said, voice serious, and Jensen blinked at him in confusion. Still, Clay seemed to be waiting for some kind of confirmation, so Jensen tentatively nodded.

“Good,” Clay said, and he sounded relieved. “You got a name, or am I calling you Jensen in the field?”

Jensen wasn’t certain why these guys were so hung up on names – well, no, he knew why, names meant something, names meant you were _human_. Still, cyborgs were given names, normally derogative ones, by their teams. Wilson would have told Clay if Jensen had a name, and if Clay was asking then obviously Wilson hadn’t told Clay a name, which meant – officially – Jensen was nameless beyond his cyborg’s line designation.

“Um… Jensen in the field?” he said in confusion. “I mean, I feel quite like I stumbled into a parallel dimension, sir, and I’m not quite certain why your team makes me feel like that but I have to say it’s very disconcerting.” Realizing he was babbling – a failing of his programming, and something that happened when his social interaction programming was overtaxed – Jensen closed his mouth and tried to look like babbling was something normal he did, not a glitch that needed to be programmed out of him.

“Alright, then. You’ll be paired up with Pooch. He’ll get you to the main computer room or what have you. You outfitted with any offensive weaponry?”

“Yessir,” Jensen said promptly, lifting his right arm and with a thought, his forearm compartment opened and a barrel popped out. “Plasma phaser. And my fingers are equipped as tasers, if it comes into closed quarters confrontations. Plus the basics modifications; superspeed, superstrength, and superdensity. I’m good. Sir.”

Clay patted Jensen’s shoulder and moved back to sit in the copilot’s seat next to Pooch. Jensen watched him go, still trying to figure out why this team seemed bound and determined to treat him differently.

A foot kicked his shin gently. He looked up to see Alvarez – Cougar, he’d heard the team calling him, and figured that to be a nickname, though not one that Jensen understood (then again, he didn’t understand Pooch, either) – glancing at him from under the shadow of that hat.

“You do not have to be nervous.”

It was that statement that let Jensen know that his inner monologue about random trivia that still floated through his processors wasn’t ‘inner’ anymore but ‘outer’ – Jensen winced and closed his mouth, but he _was_ nervous and talking was the way he dealt with it, even if that was indicative of a glitch in his program. Since he couldn’t speak, Jensen jiggled his foot. He should, he really should get rest, but he was too nervous and his microprocessors were moving too fast for him to really enter standby and allow him real rest. “I’m good,” he said finally, hoping that wouldn’t be seen as insubordination by the sergeant.

Alvarez lifted an eyebrow. “I did not mean you had to stop,” he said, and Jensen got the idea that Alvarez was gifting him with a lot more speech than he normally did anyone else. Sadly, Jensen was always bad at recognizing gifts, especially when they were given to him, and so he didn’t know how to respond. Alvarez had pointed out that Jensen had been talking nonstop, so Jensen should stop talking. Though he had absolutely nothing else to do.

He could go into standby mode. Even though he absolutely detested it – it felt too much like dying, letting his systems shut down one by one until only his backup drives were functioning.

For a moment longer, Jensen held Alvarez’s gaze, and then he let out a sigh. “I guess I’ll go into standby,” he said quietly. “Just… poke me in the shoulder when we touch down, then, yeah?” he said.

Alvarez frowned at him, but Jensen didn’t need to see his teammate’s disappointment. Instead, he initiated the standby sequence, each process closing and shutting down until all that he had left were the soft sounds of Alvarez cleaning his guns and the off-key humming of Pooch from the front seat.

-+-+-+-

“—mmit Jensen, open your fucking eyes, that’s a fucking order!”

“Recharge, boss?”

Jensen vaguely became aware of the fact that he was slung over someone’s shoulder – which he found out because he was suddenly unceremoniously no longer over that shoulder, but flipped off to lie down on a very uncomfortable surface. He would complain, only it was too much work to try and open his mouth to do so, and he found himself drifting off again to frenzied motions around him.

-+-+-+-

The job seemed to be fucked up from the beginning. For one, even with Jensen’s extra effort into finding out any additional intel he could get his hands on, there was still easily three times the amount of people they had expected. Beyond that, apparently the gun runners were all mods, which meant a lot of superstrength and superspeed that was completely unexpected. It made sense to send a black ops team after such a dangerous group, but the state of their initial information was so pitiful that Jensen briefly spared a thought to whoever had compiled it and wondered whether they had actually tried at all.

Almost off the bat, they’d realized that the head of the ring was present, and Clay had ordered that they either capture or take the guy out. That was where most of their problems had started, with trying to get at the guy and finding just more and more people popping up every corner. Finally, Jensen had managed to find the main server room, and then it had literally been the work of minutes to slide into their entire network and soak up all the information he could, dumping it onto his backup drives for later.

Pooch had stuck with him, covering his back as he blasted through their servers, and Jensen left a quickly constructed virus loose in their system, ready to start eating through all their records the minute someone tried to access a file, and then he was stepping away from the screens, shaking his hands out a bit, and nodding to Pooch that he was done.

They’d left the room only to find themselves pinned down. Thankfully, Clay, Cougar, and Roque had come to their rescue, but that just meant they were all pinned down in this office room, hiding behind file cabinets and desks and tables, trying to figure out how to get out of the room, as more hostiles poured in. Jensen, who had already had to use up a lot of his charge just getting to the room, and then he _might_ have babbled incessantly as he’d hacked into the servers, and he _might_ have shown off a bit when he’d left that virus back – and he’d certainly learned his lesson, no more using up extra processing power on computer stuff when he might need that processing power for plasma charges – Jensen realized that his team wasn’t going to get out without help. They needed a distraction.

Which, of course, was when Clay asked – _asked_ , mind you, instead of demanding, instead of ordering, and at least if Jensen was going to cease existence he’d do it by humans who treated him like one of them – if Jensen would create a diversion.

And Jensen was happy to do so.

-+-+-+-

Jensen blinked open his eyes and, honestly, was surprised he could still do so.

“You are a fucking idiot for a supposedly super-smart cyborg.”

Jensen slowly turned his head, eyes flickering as they filtered in his environment, his processes slowly coming back online. “Cap-tain Roque?” he asked, voice jerky as his synthesizers were still scrambling to catch up with the rest of him.

Roque, sitting next to him – they were in a plane? – winced. “Damn, you sound like a basic robot like that. You all there? Or too scrambled to get what I’m saying?”

“I’m – comput-ting,” Jensen replied slowly.

“Good. Then let me say this. That was the most stupid, foolhardy thing I’ve ever seen anyone do. There were other ways to create a diversion. Clay’s probably going to chew you out better than I can, but let me say this too.” Roque leaned down, and Jensen couldn’t stop the automatic reflex to flinch, servos whining as he tried to use muscular functions that still weren’t online. “That was the single bravest, most human thing I’ve ever seen a cyborg do.”

Jensen narrowed his eyes at Roque. “Maybe processes st-still slow,” he said finally. “Not sure of mean-meaning.”

Roque huffed out a breath. “No, I’m pretty sure you caught my meaning, and I’ll be damned if I’m stroking your ego any more than that.” He patted Jensen’s head and then moved away.

Jensen watched him go in confusion, which is when something soft popped him in the head. Surprised, he jerked his head to the side, eyes refocusing and filtering in the stimulation.

Alvarez sat there. For a long moment, he _just_ sat there, and finally Jensen began running his mouth. “You know, maybe a coug-cougar is a good name for you-you, Sergeant. You look like a kitten and fight like a li-lion.”

Alvarez huffed out a laugh and put a hand on Jensen’s chest, over the mechanically regulated pace of motor oil and thinned blood from the pump where his heart should be. “You, Jensen, are more human than you seem.”

“Jensen.”

More processes were online now, so it was with a smoother range of motion that Jensen turned to see Clay standing over him. Beside him, Alvarez patted Jensen’s shoulder and murmured, “You can call me Cougar too, _amigo_.”

Standing up, Alvarez moved to the front of the plane to settle in the copilot’s seat. Jensen watched him leave curiously before turning to look at Clay, who was still standing. With great effort, Jensen managed to get all his joints and wires working smoothly enough to get him sitting up without making anything creak or groan or whine too loudly. “Lieutenant colonel, sir?” he asked.

“Jensen, when I asked for a diversion, what process did you use to choose the course of action that you did?”

Jensen found that his leg was bouncing up and down – a glitch, a nervous tick that cyborgs weren’t supposed to have – and he forced himself to try and keep completely still. “I calculated the chances of survival. I included variables for our ammo – dangerously low – and the chances of more hostiles coming before we could get free – which were dangerously high. The best course of option was to take out the five hostiles present fast enough to give the team a clear path to the door, because remaining in that room would have been highly detrimental to the team’s continued existence. Sir.”

“So instead of informing me of that, you chose to interpret my request of a diversion as a suicide run?” Clay asked, voice forbidding.

“Sir, if it came down to it, there was only one expendable piece of equipment in the room, as the information I was sent to retrieve was on my backup drives, which can easily be removed through the press of an eject button. Even if you had not had the time to press said button, all information on my backup drives get put onto the US army servers in the event of my discontinued existence.”

Clay let out a long sigh and dropped down into a squat, grabbing Jensen’s chin. “Your fingers are tapping against your thigh.”

Jensen froze, holding his hand absolutely still. “I apologize, sir.”

“That’s a glitch, isn’t it? Your talking, and your occasional jerky motions. You’ve got a glitch somewhere.”

Nervous, now, Jensen felt the odd urge to swallow, even though he wasn’t human and didn’t need that physiological response to the anxiety he felt. “I assure you, sir, I can operate to my prime abilities. There is no need to wipe my programming and remove the glitch. I can run a self-diagnostic and remove the offending piece of code.”

“No, that’s not –” Clay closed his eyes and looked up at the ceiling of the plane for a moment before returning his gaze to Jensen. “Look. You’ve got ticks and tells, like a human. You chose the most self-sacrificing course of action, a choice that not many humans would make. You’re more than the code that makes you up. What do you say about being on my team permanently?”

Jensen blinked for a long moment, and felt that clarifying what had just been said to him would be appropriate in this instance. “Lieutenant colonel, sir, I am not entirely sure that I follow your conversational direction, sir.”

“How would you feel about being on my team permanently? I’ve got a lot of people who owe me favors, so before you bring up the fact that you’re a valuable resource, know I’ve got ways around that. But do you want to remain with my team?”

Uncertain, Jensen turned to look over at where the rest of the team sat – and immediately Pooch, Cougar, and Roque averted their gaze, clearing their throats self-consciously.

“You don’t have to, of course. But my team could always use a permanent hacker, especially considering that we keep on needing to ask for one to be loaned to us on short notice. And you fit in well with my team.”

Jensen felt his mouth opening and closing, but he knew his synthesizers weren’t making any noise. After a long moment, he ventured, “Colonel Wilson will not enjoy losing an asset as myself.”

“First of all, you’re as human as Roque or Cougar, okay? No more ‘equipment’ or ‘asset’ remarks,” Clay growled. “Second of all, Wilson’s in some pretty deep shit at the moment, and it’ll be a piece of cake to override his wishes. But do you _want_ to be part of my team?”

“I… would not be averse. Sir.”

“Clay. Call me Clay,” Clay said, offering his hand to Jensen.

Jensen wasn’t about to tell him that he had already been referring to everyone by their last names (or preferred nicknames, as with Pooch) in his head, because that might make Clay change his mind. So he took the hand, intending to shake it.

Clay used his hand to pull him up to his feet, surprising Jensen.

“If you’re staying, Jensen, you need a name,” Pooch called from the front.

Still feeling quite overwhelmed, Jensen looked at all of them in confusion. “I – have a name?”

“Jake,” Cougar said suddenly. “Jay.”

“Jake,” Roque said, nodding. “Your name’s Jake. Okay? Jake Jensen, our own personal cyborg with human courage.”

“I –” Jensen finally decided arguing wouldn’t be productive. And, well, he wanted to be a part of their group, and they had given him a _real_ name.

He had a feeling that the Losers were going to be the best thing that ever happened to him. Ever.


End file.
